The SEEAW in the context of Integrated Water Resource Management and the MDGs Roberto Lenton Chair, Technical Committee Global Water Partnership

Outline  Context: The challenges of monitoring and assessing water resources for the MDGs within an integrated approach  The role and value of SEEAW within this context  Issues for the future, and the proposed round- table mechanism

Context: The challenges Monitoring and assessing water resources for the MDGs within an integrated approach Global Water Partnership

Water: impacts both on Target #10 and on the MDGs as a whole Water: impacts both on Target #10 and on the MDGs as a whole Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women Goal 4: Reduce child mortality Goal 5: Improve maternal health Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability Target 9: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources Target 10: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation Target 11: By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

Monitoring Frameworks for the MDGs Target #10:  Established Institutional Mechanism: Joint Monitoring Programme of UNICEF/WHO  Agreed conceptual framework for defining and measuring access Water’s broader role for the MDGs as a whole:  Institutional Mechanism: the World Water Assessment Programme and the WWDRs  No agreed conceptual framework as yet

Why monitoring and assessing water for all the MDGs is so much more complicated!  Overall development goals (MDGs translated at national levels)  Water and development “objectives” related to goals  Actions to address these objectives, within IWRM approach  Targets to make goals, objectives and actions specific -- with defined and measurable criteria for achievement and timetables  Indicators -- to assess progress towards the targets associated with goals and objectives and the accomplishment of actions  Process indicators, which monitor the basic progress of implementing agreed actions  Outcome indicators, which monitor the direct results of actions.  Impact indicators, which monitor progress towards achieving goals and objectives.

Integrated Water Resources Management: Some core features  Involves developing efficient, equitable and sustainable solutions to water and development problems  Involves aligning interests and activities that are traditionally seen as unrelated or not well coordinated (horizontally and vertically)  Needs knowledge from various disciplines as well as insights from diverse stakeholders  Not just water: involves integrating water in overall sustainable development processes. Also requires coordinating the management of water with land and related resources

Timing is crucial  Recent establishment of SG’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation to improve global strategic focus around water  2005 was target date for completion of “IWRM and Water Efficiency” Strategies and Plans, an action target set at WSSD  2006 is the first year of “Water for Life” decade of action to achieve the MDGs  2006 saw launch of series of assessments by WWDR (2006, 2009, 2012, 2015)

The role and value of SEEAW Global Water Partnership

Value of SEEAW within MDG/IWRM context  Provides the much-needed conceptual framework for monitoring and assessment  Enables consideration and quantification of inter-linkages that are critical to an IWRM approach  By integrating water and economic accounts, facilitates the mainstreaming of water policy in economic decision making  Enables linkages with other natural resource accounts (e.g., land)  Enables different stakeholders to have a consistent and transparent frame of information from which to develop recommendations  Provides effective framework for considering specific issues (e.g., allocative efficiency)  Enables further specific indicators to be derived from it  Timing is exactly right!

Credibility and authority are critically important too!  SEEAW has credibility and authority that comes with:  Being based on established system of national accounts  Having been developed with expertise from the statistical community  Having been tested in several countries

My personal view  Would be a huge step forward if framework were accepted as an internationally agreed standard for integrating hydrologic and economic statistics  Nevertheless, several issues need further work  Need a mechanism to address them while promoting implementation and use of SEEAW

Issues and mechanisms for the future Global Water Partnership

Issues to consider: the other E’s  How to address the social dimension  Supplementary accounts  Water Quality  Impact on other resources (e.g., salinity)  Uses of water for environmental goods and services  Valuation issues

Issues to consider: Temporal and spatial variability  Temporal variability  Hydrology and economy operate at different time scales  How to deal with extreme events, disaster risk reduction  Spatial variability  Hydrology and economy operate at different spatial scales

Need mechanism for continuing work  Focus on both advancing SEEAW and promoting implementation and use  Some desirable characteristics:  Involve the key actors, including the WWAP and the Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation  Include both users and producers  Include members of both statistical and the water community  Bring in additional social, economic and environmental expertise  Enable continuing testing by participating countries  Proposed roundtable on water accounting would seem to be step in the right direction

Thank you